


Camera Lucida

by mllelaurel



Category: Sagas of Sundry: Dread (Web Series)
Genre: Blood, Drugs, Everyone's An Emotional Disaster, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Kayden's Favorite Hobby: Pushing People Away, M/M, Resurrection, Rituals, Tanner/Self Awareness: NoTP - Until It's Not, some horror elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-21 19:08:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17048918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mllelaurel/pseuds/mllelaurel
Summary: Tanner’s been dead for three years when Kayden sees him again, in the freezer aisle of the 7-11, just past the Swanson TV dinners and ice-crusted jugs of skim milk.Because sometimes, you've just got to bring a guy back from the dead.





	1. But If You're Clever And Willing To Bleed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bette/gifts).



Tanner’s been dead for three years when Kayden sees him in the freezer aisle of the 7-11, just past the Swanson TV dinners and ice-crusted jugs of skim milk. A glimpse of a camera strap, messy reddish-dishwater hair, brown plaid shirt with its collar half-popped like someone had tried and failed to smooth it down. 

Kayden’s had this dream before. In his dreams, he chases after Tanner’s elusive ghost or stands frozen, punches him or ignores him, watches Tanner’s face morph into someone else’s — Sat, or Darby, or Kayden’s mom once, for no reason that he could explain. Sometimes it’s hard to recognize a face under all that blood, gouts and clots of it, coppery and viscous, but Kayden knows it’s him anyway. He always knows. 

“You seeing this shit?” he asks the pimply clerk behind the counter, and smirks when the kid shrinks back from him. Never know what those punks might be up to, right? Could be high on something, could be getting ready to shoot up the store. _I’m not your problem, you little turd,_ Kayden thinks. _None of this is._

“Something I can help you with?” the kid mutters. Kayden plunks his Hot Pockets onto the counter, and by the time he’s done paying, Tanner is gone. 

***

His answering machine is blinking red when he gets home. Kayden stares at it long and hard, then tears out the tape and chucks it in the trash. Probably just a telemarketer, not the staticky sounds of battle, or scratchy silence with something slithering underneath, or Tanner’s dying screams. Probably. 

***

The second time he sees Tanner is on the train. They’ve stopped yet again, broken down or paused for birdshit on the tracks, who even knows. The old lady on Kayden’s left is fanning herself, her skin butter-yellow in the heat. She winks at Kayden when he passes her his flask of Southern Comfort. It’s not water, but at least it’s fucking liquid, so the old broad won’t croak of a heart attack literally on top of him. “I won’t tell the cops if you won’t.” 

Kayden shrugs. “Fuck, it’s not like either of us is driving.” 

She grins at him, gap-toothed. “Does it look like my rheumy ass can drive, cupcake?” Kayden laughs, a little too loud, the sound of it echoing in his head like the voice of a stranger. 

The train grinds, jerks, starts moving again. The standing passengers sway, and there he is, hand gripping the rail, ragged cuticles and broken fingernails, and the whiff of chemicals in Kayden’s nose as the train lurches forward, hurtling the body, this Tanner-not-Tanner, right into him. Tanner’s sleeve brushes his face, stiff with bad detergent.  


The shriek swells in Kayden’s throat, hoarse as a bleat and coated in a thin stream of bile. “Get the fuck away from me.” 

“You tripping balls kid?” The old lady edges away from him, and Kayden shrinks in his seat, fingernails biting into his arms. “Yeah,” he croaks. “That’s totally it.” 

She clicks her tongue. “God love ya,” she says. “Get a better dealer.” 

Kayden’s arms itch for the rest of the day. He drinks and curses himself for getting spooked like a tit-sucking toddler, and every time he gets distracted, he sees Tanner’s eyes. It’s the eyes that got to him, untracking and flat, reflecting some other room’s light like a faded photograph. 

***

Two days later, he finds Raina on his doorstep, wrestling a draped canvas bigger than her up the stairs. “Finally! Don’t you ever pick up the phone?”

“No,” Kayden says, and fishes for the keys. 

She shoulders her way inside before he can tell her to leave. He always forgets little Raina’s stronger than she looks. “Make yourself at home,” he says needlessly. 

“You need to see this,” she says, and pulls the sheet off the canvas. The smell of acrylics hits him first, still fresh, a little smudged. It smells like art school and failure: same thing as far as Kayden is concerned. 

It’s just splotches, Kayden thinks. If he looks at the paint one little dab at a time, like it’s a closeup of a goddamn Monet. He won’t have to see the portrait in its totality. He won’t have to look at Tanner sitting ramrod-straight in his painted chair, glassy-eyed without his glasses. Tiny letters scroll along the bottom of the portrait: Tanner Sills; October 21, 1966 - June 14th, 1986. 

Kayden’s mouth goes dry. “That’s fucked up,” he says at last. “I’m proud of you.” 

“I didn’t…” Raina’s voice wavers. 

“Should have put the dates on the back if you really wanted to be authentic. Though if you _really_ want authentic, I’d take out a limb or two. Maybe add some blood for color - or what color do you think old intestines are? It’s not red, but…”

“Stop it!” Kayden barely ducks the remote control she hurls at him. It bounces off the wall and cracks. No TV for him until he gets a new one. “God, you are still such a fucking tool!” 

“ _I’m_ the tool?” Kayden’s eye twitches, blurring the room around him. “Did I bring that in here like it’s all part of some cosmic fucking joke? Did I fucking paint it like, what was it, is it fucking therapeutic for you? Fucking hippy dippy art fucking therapy?”

“I didn’t paint it!” Raina screams, cutting the wind right out of him. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Tears roll down her cheek, and she wipes them, smearing mascara. 

Kayden feels like a dipshit, but that’s nothing new. “Who did?” he asks, quiet. 

“It’s…” Raina wraps her arms around herself. “I was painting something different,” she says. “Here,” and she pulls a sheaf of Polaroids out of her jacket. “I do it to track my work,” she says, before he can ask, and Kayden doesn’t need her to spell out why. A photograph fixes reality. It’s there and it is what it is. It’s not a voice in the dark, or an extra version of you, doubled over laughing. 

Except when it is. 

He flips through sketches of a smiling girl, snake tattoo winding its way up her arm. She’s pretty, Kayden thinks, in a clean, Mother Earth sort of way. “Friend of yours?” he asks, and for once he doesn’t mean to make it sound like an insinuation. It just comes out that way, because he is, as has been amply pointed out, a tool. Raina ignores it, thank small miracles. 

“Friend of Darby’s,” she says. “Well, both of ours, but hers first.” 

The next few snaps show the portrait taking shape. Sallow skin gains dimension, hair gains weight and highlights, the smile turns mischievous. Kayden stares at the last Polaroid. It would have been a good painting, if Raina had gotten to finish it. 

“That was last week,” Raina says. “I got distracted, then I picked it up again last night, and…” 

Kayden refuses to look at it. “You did all of that in a night?”

“What, like you never get into a groove?” 

He hasn’t. Kinda part of the problem when it comes to him and art; the part that’s not heroin or distraction or his goddamn lack of any worthwhile talent. 

“I got in a groove,” Raina says. “And then I got out. And then I saw.” 

“Did you show Darby?”

Raina nods. “Sat’s on her way right now, too.” She makes a face. “We didn’t contact you last, swear. If you ever bothered to pick up the phone.” 

“Where are you going with this?” Kayden asks. His whole body feels clumsy, heavy with the weight of an oncoming storm. 

“Darby thinks it’s starting again,” Raina says. 

“It didn’t ‘start’ last time,” Kayden retorts. “We dragged ourselves into it.” If only they had stayed away, they’d have been fine. Except taking the blame for it means blaming Sat, and that’s the one thing he’s not allowing himself to do. If they had stayed away, Raina and Darby would’ve split for good. Darby might be in a cult now, if not a nuthouse. If they had stayed away, he’d still be a worthless failure of a Blockbuster clerk, and Sat would still be homeless. If they had stayed away, Tanner would still be alive. 

“What if this is our chance?” Raina asks. “What if we can bring him back this time?”

“You sound like Darby,” Kayden says. They’d already tried that three years ago. Goatface took them for a ride. They failed. Better than Tanner coming back a zombie, Kayden supposes. What were they thinking, invoking such a vague, hopeless Monkey’s Paw of wishes?

“I believe in her,” Raina says. “She never promised last time. She just said she’d try. And she did! And maybe this time it’ll work, if we all try hard enough. Or maybe it won’t, but look.” She gestures at the portrait. “ _Something_ ’s happening. Something’s come loose, and either we run or we _try_.” 

“You really love her,” Kayden says. It’s no kind of argument. He’s not sure what the hell he’s doing, bringing it up at all, but Raina nods. 

“I do,” and there’s no reason why it should matter, but something, some stupid thing in Kayden says it does. 

“All right, fine,” he says. “We’re taking your car.” 

***

Darby’s poster in the hall nearly makes Kayden march right the fuck back out the door. He knows it’s Darby’s because. Well, because it’s fucking obvious, what with the goat riding a pole, or maybe pinned atop it. Huge, twisty horns, what looks like a flower wreath in its hair. Smarmy, goaty grin. A third eye in the middle of its forehead. Geometric shapes swirl around it, winds, or stained glass, or maybe glass stained with blood. A pillar rises behind it like a freaky-ass goat dick, pair of balls hanging below for good measure. Inside the balls, humanoid figures contort, one of them horned.

He fights off a familiar chill. "Remind me how you're still a dyke." 

Darby, green apron thrown over her work slacks, flips him off by way of greeting. “Not everything’s about who we want to fuck, Kayden.” 

“It’s him, isn’t it?”

Darby shakes her head. “Not the shaman. He’s gone.” That was part of the bargain. His blood to cleanse the mesa. Their blood as well, like they hadn’t just stumbled into his bullshit historical soap opera, but hell, when has Kayden ever cared about losing a few drops of hemo? 

Still looks like him, though, or whatever he had become. Whatever had sought him in the twilight hours. Kayden remembers the notebook they’d found, the first rotten time around, the way the words had slid past his eyes, ice-picking into his brain. Something old and mischievous. Something that claimed to like humanity, or at least find it amusing. 

“It’s the devil,” Darby says. Kayden stares at her. Of all the people to fall for the Satanic Panic, he would have thought Darby’d be the last on the list. “That’s what they call the tarot card,” she continues. “In the more standard Rider-Waite…”

Kayden cuts her off. “Blah blah blah, still don’t speak Greek.”

“By common tarot definition, the Devil stands for temptation. You go to the crossroads, you meet the Devil, you give him your soul, and he gives you music, or money, or love. Something you would die for. But here’s the thing. The crossroads and its stories existed long before Christianity. You go to the crossroads if you want something bad enough, and you wait, and if you’re worthy, if you earn his respect, he’ll teach you. He’ll show you the way.” Her eyes glitter, half madness, all focus. Same old Darby. “In a Thoth tarot like this one here, the Devil is rebellion. It’s doing what you want even if it’s dangerous, even if it’s forbidden. He’s the outcast, the misunderstood, the visionary.”

“Okay, so what you’re saying is it’s _my_ dick up there.”

Darby snorts. “Your dick up your own ass, more like,” and she hugs him. It’s unexpected, but it shouldn’t be. Three years, and still there are strings between them, all of them. Kayden’s pretty sure they all wish they could stop caring, but that way’s closed, the ship has sailed, the wench is dead. “How’ve you been, dummy?” she asks. 

He deflects. “How do you plan on raising the dead this time?”

Darby sighs. “I’m still not guaranteeing it will work. But I know more, this time. I’ve come prepared. And he’s - Tanner’s been trying to reach us. That’s got to mean something, right?”

The doorbell rings before he can answer, and Sat steps inside, wafting in a cloud of clove smoke and dusky perfume. “Well, fuck our lives,” she says, brushing her lips over Raina’s cheek, then Darby’s, and finally lingering on Kayden’s. She looks good, Kayden thinks, beautiful as always and so alive it hurts.

“Tanner’s still inconveniencing us,” Kayden says dryly. “News at eleven.”

Sat frowns. Right, fine, okay, still a ‘too soon’ label on that one. He doesn’t bother apologizing, and Sat turns to Darby instead. “What do we do?”

***

The first thing they do is argue, which is all kinds of familiar. 

“We’ll need someone to go in,” Darby says. She’s been explaining exactly how for over half an hour. Something about the boundaries of dream and reality being the same as the boundaries between life and death, and a drug which will help blur the two. 

“Acid?” Kayden suggests, not at all seriously, but Darby nods.

“Yes and no. Like you’ve said, when you’re on acid, you _know_ you’re hallucinating, which is the opposite of what we want. There is, however, a compound called ayahuasca. They’ve been using it for vision quests in South America for,” she spreads her hands. “Well, a long time.” 

The longer Darby talks, the more Sat’s expression crumples. “I should be the one doing this,” she says. Still carrying her guilt over Tanner, after all this time, and refusing to believe the rest of them have got their own corner of that table. She’s also been stone-sober since her hospitalization. If she falls off the wagon now, who the fuck knows what’s going to happen. 

“I can do it,” Raina pipes up. Always offering, just to prove she can. 

Darby looks away. “It definitely can’t be me. I’ll be the touchstone for the ritual, so I can pull you back when you’re done.” At least she’s not asking them to protect her this time. Quite the opposite, not that she would believe it. 

“I’ll do it,” Kayden says. “I fucked it up last time, so it’s on me.” Sat gives him an incredulous look. “I said it wasn’t going to work, said to focus on getting three people home, remember? Can’t have a Doubting Thomas in the party or everything goes shitshape.” Who knows if it was his fault or if bringing Tanner back was the pipe dream he’d believed it to be. Either way, it makes for a good argument now. “Besides, I’m used to being high, so it’ll fuck with me less.”

“You’ve taken ayahuasca?” Raina fixes him with a stare. Not all hallucinogens are created equal. He was just hoping they didn’t know that. 

Kayden shrugs. 

He expects Sat to try arguing him down, but she just looks at him, long and hard. “Maybe it should be you,” she says. “It should be someone who…” She doesn’t finish. He doesn’t push her to. 

“Okay,” Darby holds up her hands. “Just so you all know, this will take a lot. Belief and sacrifice.” She presses on before someone can interrupt her. “Real magic cannot be made by offering someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.” 

Raina smiles. “The Last Unicorn?” Darby nods, manic expression softening. 

Sat sighs into her bangs. “Okay. Glad that’s a reference, because no one’s literally tearing out their liver on my watch.” She glares around the circle. “I mean it, you guys.”

“It’s not a strict requirement,” Darby says. “We will need four offerings though, one from each of us, and they can’t be light ones.” She counts off on her fingers. “The first one is a secret. A truth. Something from the gut. Something you don’t want to voice, even to yourself.”

Sat closes her eyes. “Yep. That one’s mine. Okay. Next?”

“The next thing we need is blood.” Kayden wishes it wasn’t too late for him to throw that hat in the ring.

Darby’s hands shake when Raina looks up. Kayden sees her lips moving. _Please, no._

“How much do you need?” Raina asks. 

“Almost as much as you can afford to lose,” Darby says quietly. “We will do everything we can to keep you alive.” 

“I’ll do it,” Raina says. “I’m probably the healthiest person here, I’ll be fine!”

Darby tries to breathe, and it turns into a sob. Raina leans against her as she buries her face in her hands. “I’ll be fine. Promise.” 

“I know,” Darby says after a moment. “You have as much right to offer as anyone here. The fact that I’m asking any of you…” Raina kisses her, and Kayden gets the urge to look away. He’s never been a prude, but this is love, and love’s both rare and private. 

“We’re looking at a liter and a half of blood.” Darby laces her hands together, looks down, swallows. “About thirty percent of total volume. Am I the only one here who knows first aid?”

“Tanner took a class,” Kayden says. 

“Very funny.” Darby leans her forehead against Raina’s. “I’ll take care of you baby, I promise.” Raina squeezes her hand and pulls away. “What else?”

“I don’t know what yours will be,” Darby says to Kayden. “Whatever they ask, or whatever you offer. Whatever will be enough.”

“Vague,” Kayden says, flashing a lopsided grin. “I love it. What about you?”

“Me?”

“What do you give up?” 

“Magic,” Darby says. “This will be my last ritual. It has to be, or it won’t work.” 

Kayden tries and fails to think of something sarcastic. Jury’s still out on how well Darby’s rituals have ever worked, but no one, not even him, doubts how much of her sanity she’s poured into them. “So you’re going straight after this?” he finally asks. 

She laughs, an exhale of air more than a sound, and her eyes never leave Raina’s face, even for a second. “Only in one sense,” she says. 

“How long will the setup take?” asks Sat, fiddling with the lace on her sleeves. 

Darby chews on her lip, thinking. “The ayahuasca’s got to be brewed overnight.”

“Do we even have any?” Raina asks. 

Darby looks sheepish. “I know where to get some. Guy runs a retreat…”

“So we’re doing this in a week, not now,” Kayden says. 

“We want to be prepared.” _Unlike last time._

“Well that’s fucking anticlimactic,” Kayden says in the hanging silence. 

“Take the week,” Darby says, ticking off instructions with her fingers. “Don't eat anything salty or rich the night before, and nothing the day of. Not even water, or the drug will make you even sicker." So it'll make him sick. Great. Won't be the first trip to do that. Probably won't be the last. 

Darby takes his hand, squeezing it once before letting go. "Be ready," she tells him. 

***

Kayden supposes he’s meant to spend the week like it’s his last. He quits his shitty job by not showing up or calling, so maybe that counts. On what’s probably not his last night on Earth, he drinks half a bottle of toilet-tasting whiskey, sleeps badly, and wakes up hungover. 

A quarter past four in the afternoon, he takes the bus to Raina and Darby’s. The guy seated in front of him has hair the shape of Tanner’s, but proves to be real, scraggly beard and all. It’s funny—now that he’s resigned to the madness, Kayden keeps expecting to see Tanner again, maybe get a hint that they’re on the right track, but the week goes by without a glimpse of him. It feels, in the dark recesses of Kayden’s mind, like Tanner’s fucking with them. One last laugh at his old friends’ expense, never mind that he’d never do that. 

The apartment smells like coffee, forest floor, and stagnant water, and just like that, Kayden’s back in 1986, hand over his mouth, waiting for Simon or his zombies to come and find him. Simon and the Zombies. Sounds like the name of a shitty garage band playing out of mom and dad’s basement. Kayden’s knuckles itch for a wall to punch; his nostrils itch for air. He sags into the couch, puts a frilly pillow over his face, and tries to sleep while they wait for Darby to pick up Sat. 

He takes off the pillow after Sat arrives, face blank as he watches Sat put on rubber gloves, swab down Raina’s forearm with a sterile wipe and slide a needle into her vein. The fact that she can find a vein on her second try after three years cocaine-free makes her better at this shit than any nurse Kayden’s ever met. They’ve decided that needle-tube-and-bag is a safer place to bleed than all over the room uncontrollably. Kayden probably doesn’t want to know where they got the equipment. Raina leans against his shoulder, still alert. They’re going slow enough the blood loss won’t make her pass out for some time. Darby draws a series of interlocking patterns onto the living room floor, pant legs gray with chalk dust, then fills a bowl with reddish liquid from an old teapot, handing it to Kayden. The liquid inside it sloshes, thick and unappealing. 

"Right," she says, brushing off her pants. “I think we’re ready to start.” 

Raina gives her a left-handed thumbs up. Sat smiles, the kind that doesn’t reach her eyes, pulls out her lipstick and applies it like war paint. They’re just waiting for him now, Kayden thinks. Bases loaded, gun cocked, here we go. 

Kayden raises the bowl to his lips. The liquid's viscous, tasting of rancid grapefruit, bitter chocolate, and sulfur. Kayden has to force himself to choke it down. He’s swallowed worse, but not by much. Immediately, he feels his mouth start going numb, though he might just be imagining this because he expects it. His stomach churns. Darby takes one look at him and runs to fetch a bucket.

He cracks his knuckles. "Right. Fuck. Okay."

***

By the time they're done covering the chalk lines in blood and fingerprints, the bucket's come in handy. Kayden gags one last time, spits, and wipes his mouth. Last night's whiskey was a bad idea. They weren't friends. He didn't need to see it again. Apparently the whiskey disagreed. Darby takes his pulse, then makes him chug another mouthful of vile shit. Sat grabs the bucket and hauls it out, mouthing "seventh grade" when only Kayden's looking. She's a good friend who's forgiven him the Vodka Incident many years ago, but she sure as hell won't let him live it down. Hell, if he lives, he's not living tonight down either. Mess disposed, Sat curls into Kayden's left side again, elbow threaded through his. Raina takes his right hand. Twenty minutes in, her fingers are freezing, eyes no longer focusing as well as they should. “This is going to be a butt to clean up,” she whispers in his ear muzzily. Darby, sitting cross-legged across from Kayden, shoots her another worried look, but presses on. 

“We are in the moment between life and death, where the blood has not dried and the bodies have not begun to cool, nor stiffen.” The blood will not be allowed to dry with Darby and Sat constantly reapplying it. Raina’s not wrong about how bad the cleaning will be. A full blood bag quivers in Sat’s lap as her grip on Kayden’s hand tightens. She’ll cut off his circulation if she’s not careful. 

“We are in the moment when dreams and lies fall away and only the truth remains.” That would be Sat’s cue. Kayden feels the shift in her body as she draws a shaky breath. 

“Before he died, Tanner told me he loved me.” Kayden spares her a sideways glance, shocked to see she’s not crying. “That was his truth,” Sat says. “It wasn’t mine. In the moment, I…” She swallows. “God. I wanted to throw up, I wanted to hold him and not let go, even if he was a corpse, to kiss him awake. I’d do anything if it meant bringing him back. I’d even…” She shakes her head. “No, that’s not. I mean...

“I didn’t love him,” she says, then shakes her head again. “No, wait, that’s not true either. Of course I fucking loved him, we all did.” She sniffs, and now the tears start falling. “It was a few months before I started hating him, or maybe before I admitted I hated him for fucking _doing_ that to me! For fucking saying he loved me and leaving. Just like that, boom, it wasn’t _his_ problem anymore, was it?” 

_Coward_ , Kayden thinks, and it’s aimed at Tanner, not Sat. It’s one thing to be brave while holding off zombies; another to slice into your own chest, bare your own heart, and stick around for the results. _Is that why you did it? So you’d die a hero before she got the chance to turn you down?_

_Not like you can talk,_ pipes up a treacherous part of his brain. 

“But more than that,” Sat continues, “I hated myself for failing to love him when he _needed_ me to.” She turns to look at Kayden. “You didn’t fuck it up last time. I did.”

“You didn’t owe him,” Kayden snaps. 

“He _died_ for me!” 

“You still didn’t fucking owe him. No one owes that, not for anyone.”

Sat’s jaw tightens. “Can we not? Can we please just finish this?” 

Kayden looks away. 

“One will walk forward,” Darby intones, “not into death, but into the place between. And every step he takes will be echoed by his dead, until they meet in the middle, life and death in accord.” She holds up a raggedy strap, all that’s left of Tanner’s camera, dips it into Raina’s blood, then brushes the strap across Kayden’s forehead. He expects it to start drying immediately, but it sits there, slick and weirdly chilly. The ayahuasca congeals in his stomach, his vision starting to spot at the edges.

“Close your eyes, then open them again,” Darby says, and there’s a gentleness in her voice Kayden had never noticed before. His eyelids drift, heavy, shading his world in a red screen. Patterns dance, faint light, or the brain doodling in the empty dark. _Open them again._

***

Kayden opens his eyes in pure, throbbing darkness. His ears ring with the humming, subliminal pitch of telephone wires in a storm. Hours pass before he finds the shape of his tongue, opens his mouth, licks his lips, realizes they’re dry. His chest feels empty, hollow without the rise-and-fall of breath, or the beating of a heart. 

_Where the fuck is Tanner?_ The thought shocks him out of his body and back into it all at once. He runs, or tries to, shoes silent against the surface of the world, outstretched hands meeting no edge. 

“Tanner?” His voice echoes, and that in itself is reassuring. Echo means walls, a high-vaulted ceiling. Something structured. Something he can wrap his mind around, or at least fool himself into thinking he can. 

Something stirs, barely more than a retinal shadow, but hard to miss in the vastness of nothing, and Kayden chases after it. “Can you hear me, Tanner? Get your ass over here.” 

There is no light, but somehow Kayden knows the exact moment the figure in front of him turns. Thick glasses, shaky hands, one sneaker with its sole starting to come loose. 

_Tanner._

_No,_ Kayden thinks. _Not quite._ He looks like Tanner, _feels_ like Tanner, from the worried glint in his eyes to the fullness of his mouth. He might be Tanner, but he’s something more besides. Kayden knows it with all the surety of a dream. 

“What do you want?” he says. 

The figure stares at him, silent. _Whatever they ask,_ Darby had told him. _Whatever you’re willing to give._

“You fucking owe us,” Kayden says. “Dragging us into your bullshit. Promising Darby you’d give him back-” But this isn’t the shaman. Kayden’s the one who said as much, and even he hadn’t promised Darby Tanner in particular. Just her greatest wish, or dream, or whatever. Sat’s the one who made it about Tanner, and the rest of them had followed her like they always did. 

_Not like Darby didn’t get her wish anyway,_ some ornery part of Kayden’s brain supplies. Got the girl, got the validation, got to be chosen one who laid a curse to rest. 

And now she's laid it all on the line, with Raina bleeding out on the linoleum for a final desperate spell. _You don’t get to become a witch by ripping out someone else’s liver._

The figure stares at him with Tanner’s eyes, and in them, Kayden sees flickers of pain. Pain, and fear, and a desperate sort of hope. Was this what Tanner had felt, facing his own death? 

“What do you want?” Kayden asks again. The figure shoves his hands in his pockets. “I know, right. I don’t know why I bother. It’s like talking to a goddamn wall.” Kayden has to laugh. Talking to _Tanner_ always felt like talking to a goddamn wall, like hitting the wall at top speed and hoping you don’t splatter across the dashboard. “Is this what you want, Tanner?” He balls up his fists. “Would you rather stay dead until you calcify into a fucking saint?” Kayden draws a harsh breath, realizes he _can_ breathe. “When you’re dead, who’s gonna remember what a shithead you were? Another year and all we’ll remember is we loved you.” 

And something breaks, and the figure reaches - _Tanner_ reaches for him. Ghostly fingers pass through Kayden’s ribcage, and it’s all Kayden can do not to grab him right there. Not to wrap his own arms around him in turn and hold him solid as an act of will. The figure’s lips move. Kayden squints to make out the words, some part already knowing what they'll be. 

"Help me. Please." 

It's pathetic, and a guilt trip, and it _works_ , bleeding out the last dregs of Kayden's anger. 

“I’m here,” Kayden says. “I’m not leaving without you.”

Something laughs in the back of his mind, something alien, and heavy, and not-Tanner. _Oh, here we go._ Sigils bubble behind his eyelids, words without words. Words are all well and good, but bringing your buddy back from the dead won’t come free. Kayden stares into Tanner’s form, cold and translucent, and then he looks deeper. 

_You will have to give something up. Something that will hurt. This thing is old, and old demands respect. But it’s a trickster too. Come at it all bleeding-heart-earnest and it will eat your heart in the marketplace. That’s where Darby made her mistake, or would have, without an intermediary. It doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care about your feelings. But if you’re clever and willing to bleed, it will crouch on its heels, perk its ears, and listen._

Kayden feels a grin crack his face. For once in his life, he knows exactly what he needs to do. 


	2. And Nothing of the Grave

In the dim, hypothetical space which follows death, Tanner is, and he isn’t, and he is. Death, to him, is the end of all things new: action, and decision, and actualization. If death worked the way it should, it should have been the end of memory as well. Instead, everything is memory, distant and unsatisfying. 

***

He’s eleven years old, and Sat is ringing his doorbell, bouncing impatiently from one foot to another. Her hair is wet from the lake, her mouth shiny with lip gloss. “Come on, dummy, we’re gonna be late.” From the living room, his mother watches, disapproving. Tanner squares his shoulders, grabs his towel, and walks out. 

His mother’s never liked Sat, but there’s nothing she can do about it. Maybe it's because Sat's Asian ('Chinese,' Tanner's mother would say, only Sat's not Chinese.) Maybe it's because she wears crop tops, or chews gum, or makes Tanner laugh. His mother doesn't say any of these things out loud, though Tanner half-dares her to try. She puts a lot of effort, after all, into being a Very Nice Woman. 

Tanner knows how she is. Sometimes the daring her to say it almost explodes out of his chest, and he grits his teeth and traps it inside. They’re both so very good at trapping their words, and he hates her for it, so much it makes him want to throw up. 

***

He’s fourteen years old, and Darby’s just kicked his ass at lacrosse, on one of those rare occasions when the teacher let them play guys versus girls. He sits on the bleachers and tries really hard to come up with a joke at his own expense. Not caring is _hard_ when all he wants to do is double over and pray no one tells his dad.

Darby’s cheerfully oblivious, slinging an arm over his shoulders, telling him they can have a rematch any time, like he _enjoys_ getting pummeled by a girl. When Raina comes over, Tanner thinks she’s here for Darby. The two of them are all in each other’s pockets. But it’s him she’s looking at, kind of shy, kind of sideways. 

“Sat said…” 

Tanner can’t hide the way his face lights up when she mentions Sat’s name. 

“I mean… You were in my photography class last year. You remember, right?”

Of course he remembers, though he hadn’t expected her to. Girls weren’t big on talking to the guys last year, least of all guys like him. “You’re the one who did the hand-colored photo.” The tree in a storm, branches caught in motion, image slicked and blurred by the raindrops on her lens. Barely-visible wisps of watercolor blue and the deep shade of black you never actually get in black-and-white. 

_You’re not very technical, but that was still really good,_ Tanner had told her last year, in critique. He fervently hopes she doesn't remember. 'I wanted to steal that photo' is what he wishes he'd told her instead, touching on the slimmest, sharpest edge of the truth. She'd captured beauty, and he wanted it, even if it made him sound like a klepto. 

In the present, the moment passes, and he still hasn’t found the right words. They look at each other awkwardly and he can tell she’s chewing on her lower lip. 

“Raina, right?” he asks. 

She nods. “It was supposed to be Reina, like a queen, but Mom didn’t know how to spell it. Can you…? Um. Could you show me your photos, sometimes? You don’t have to, of course! But you totally can!” Her voice rises, high and nervous, and Tanner does his best to smile. 

“Sure,” he says, swallowing ‘I’m not very good, but…’ _No, don’t say that, that’s stupid, that’s just fishing for compliments._ “Sure.” 

***

He’s sixteen years old, watching Sat and Kayden smoke up behind the dumpsters, the weed pungent in his nostrils even through day-old trash. “Get over here,” Sat grins, sleek hair wreathed with smoke. Tanner twists the camera lens until she comes into focus, mystic and bright and the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. 

The next shot is a zoom, close-up of Kayden’s hands, Band-Aid over his thumb as he rolls the joint. Long, elegant fingers marred by tiny scars, matte black nail polish. Tanner’s glad for the camera. Without it, he’d be staring, and Kayden already looks like he’d love the excuse to beat the stuffing out of him. He looks up at the whir-click of the shutter, eyes bloodshot, glinting, and knowing. Tanner swallows, forgets to breathe. Coughs, like he’s the one smoking. 

Kayden’s lips quirk up. From where Tanner’s standing, it looks less a smile than a challenge. “You in?” 

(They’ve been here before. Darby’s backyard, a packet of LSD. Kayden shrugging and turning away when Tanner bows out, like it doesn’t matter whether or not he says yes. Like Kayden’s already forgotten he exists.)

Tanner puts down his camera. “Fuck it,” he says. “Fine.” It’s not like he’s been curious. This is just like cigarettes, dank and smelling faintly of peat bog, or at least what Tanner imagines peat bog to smell like. 

Kayden rolls his eyes. “Don’t do us any favors.”

Tanner sits down hard. “I said I’m in,” he says, and takes the joint. 

The smoke burns his lungs, the thick, grassy taste of it coating the back of his throat. His vision blurs, dilating and mellowing. Everything’s softer like this. Even Sat. Even Kayden, leaning into his personal space, the spikes of his hair wilting slightly. Tanner lets himself sway, head on Kayden’s shoulder without quite knowing how it got there. He’s warm, Tanner thinks, smelling of sweat and leather. When his fingers come to pluck the joint from Tanner’s mouth, Tanner’s lips part for them of their own volition. It’s not a big deal. He’s stoned, so it’s not his responsibility. Time is something which only happens to other people. Sat flops over into both their laps, hair spilling over Tanner’s hands, laughing, joyful and too loud, and maybe Tanner never knew what good was because this. This is good. 

His father smells the pot on him, of course. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tanner’s shoulder aches from being shoved into the doorjamb. It’ll bruise later. He straightens up his face, keeping it as emotionless as he can, wishing he had his camera as a shield. His throat’s dry and he blames the pot. 

_This is all Kayden’s fault_ , he thinks, because like hell he’s letting his family blame it all on Sat. Kayden’s smirk echoes in his memory. _He’s the one who goaded me into it._

He stammers out the excuses, and his father believes him. Lays a hand on his bruised shoulder, and Tanner doesn’t wince. _Take it like a man._ “I just want you to have a good future,” he says, “that’s all. What if you got arrested?”

“I’ll be careful,” Tanner promises, and in that moment he means it. 

“There are people out there who will always support you,” his father says. He means the family, of course, and others like them. People who fight to succeed, who never step out of line. “And there are people who are bent on going nowhere. The’ll drag you down with them if you let them.” 

Tanner clenches his fists. “I won’t.”

When he closes his eyes that night, he sees Kayden’s face. 

***

His eyes are still shut, and Kayden’s face is still there, teeth bared in a startled snarl. Fluorescent lights ping and flicker overhead. Tanner’s cold - and that’s new. Death is supposed to feel cold, but it doesn’t. Nothing can’t be cold, and he’s cold. 

Air from an open freezer rolls over his ankles and is gone. Kayden is gone, and Tanner is alone again, without so much as a heart left to clench in a chest he doesn’t have. 

***

Acrylics dry gluey on his cheek as Raina paints a stripe over his face, unseeing. Sat’s eyes are wide as he stares at her through a vanity mirror, tears smearing makeup down her cheeks. Kayden again, this time close enough to touch, his chest heaving, his body warm as an explosion. 

Is he dreaming? That would make a little sense, except for the part where the dead don’t dream. 

Darby’s pulled up on the the side of the road when he catches up to her. Her eyes are so tired when she lifts her head from the wheel to look at him, but she smiles when she sees him, that bright feverish smile she wore in the woods the night before he died. “Hey Tanner,” she says. “Hold tight. We’re coming to get you.” And he knows this isn’t a dream. 

***

He’s gone again, only Kayden’s there this time. Somehow, both of these things are true, and Kayden’s never been his first choice when it comes to safety, but Tanner reaches for him nonetheless. Reaches for the light-and-aliveness of him. “Help me. Please,” and Kayden says, “I’m not leaving without you,” and it all comes in fragments and bursts. Tanner thinks he hears someone laughing, and he watches something inside Kayden dim, and the next time Kayden grabs for his hand, fingers close on fingers. 

***

Light. As in ‘let there be,’ but also real light, fluorescent and flickering. Tanner licks his lips, feels the hard floor under his back. 

“Where am I?” _Such a cliche_ , he thinks, _having that be the first thing you say._ He tries to sit up, muscles stiff - _still not bad, considering how many pieces - yeah, not thinking about that_ \- and knocks over a bowl of red goop. It slimes over his feet, and that’s when he realizes: A) he’s naked, and B) he’s not alone. Sat is staring at him, both hands over her mouth, and then he’s on his back again as she knocks him over, hugging him hard enough to hurt. The best hurt he’s ever felt. 

“Get a room,” someone says. Kayden, rubbing the back of his head and looking like hell as he also sits up. _He’s_ still dressed, the asshole.

“I’m alive,” Tanner says, his own voice flat and mechanical in his ears, and that’s when he sees Raina. Adrenaline sings him onto his feet as he scrambles to her side. She’s pale, her skin clammy, pulse reedy in her wrist, but it’s _there_ and that’s all that matters. “Someone fucking call an ambulance!” 

“It’ll look like a suicide attempt,” Darby says. She’s shaking and she doesn’t even try to hide it. “We’ve got to get our stories straight.” Sat’s already gone for the phone, already dialing. “We need to get rid of the blood.”

Kayden shakes his head. “If she really tried to off herself, it would be all over the tub. Dump it there.” 

Darby glares at him. “I meant the floor.”

Tanner looks down at the sigils drawn around him, already starting to brown and dull. “I’ll do it,” he says, because it’s something to do. There’s an emergency. They need him to act, not think. 

“You need some fucking clothes,” Kayden says. Oh. Right. “Here, take my shirt.” He strips off his faded, patchy denim jacket for the black t-shirt underneath, then strips that too. “Darby’s pants should fit you.” 

Something inside Tanner boils at the idea of wearing girls’ pants, but on the scale of problems he’s got right now, that doesn’t even rate. The t-shirt’s loose on him, and the pants Darby throws his way as he scrubs are too tight. “Just dump some of the other blood here,” he finally spits out. “It’ll cover them up.” He doesn’t want to think about Darby’s cleaning bills after this, or the hospital bill, or…

The doorbell rings, and they’re out of time. The paramedics rush in, and Sat takes the lead. Tanner never realized how good she’d be at lying. He wonders if it should bother him. Kayden’s deposited Raina in the shower stall, trailing blood from living room to bathroom, resting her foot in it long enough to leave a print. If they get caught, Tanner thinks, this will look like nothing so much as attempted murder and conspiracy. Raina can clear them if she wakes up, but oh God, that _if_. 

He sits down on the floor and doesn’t bother trying to keep himself from shaking. It sells the story when he looks fucked up enough he can’t form words. Hell, he _is_ that fucked up. The ambulance takes off howling into the night, and only then does Darby sag beside him and burst into sobs. 

“Why didn’t you go with them?” Tanner asks. 

“I’m just her ‘roommate,’” she replies, hollow-eyed. “Why would they let me?”

Tanner hugs her. It seems like the thing to do. They sit there in the middle of the living room, bloody and adrenaline high, and Tanner tries very hard to pretend that the tears dripping down his neck are all hers. 

***

Raina wakes up the next morning, woozy and disoriented, but cogent enough to pick up the thread of the attempted suicide story. It doesn’t take much convincing. She’s an artist. They do that, apparently. She says she regrets it, so they don’t bother keeping her overnight. Tanner bristles - if she’d really needed their help, she might be dead in a day without oversight. She’s AB+, a universal recipient, so at least she’s got all the transfusions she’s ever going to need. 

“I don’t regret it at all,” she whispers in his ear when he bends down to hug her. “You’re really...It’s really you?” 

“It’s really me,” Tanner says, and it feels like lying. He’s gone to borrow some of Kayden’s clothes earlier. It’s baggy on him, except for the parts that are too tight. Without his customary glasses, the world is fuzzy. He can navigate, but only just. 

He misses his camera. 

Sometime around two in the morning, he goes to the bathroom, turns on the sink, and lets the water run over his hands. The slam of a door startles him out of it, ten minutes later. He keeps forgetting he _has_ hands. 

He carries Raina from the wheelchair to her car, anchored by her light weight. When Sat reaches out to take his hand, he grips it, tight enough to make her flinch. She’s left lipstick marks all over his face in the moments between worrying and waiting. He hated having to wash them off. Darby drives, with Raina at her side in the front seat. Tanner wedges himself in the back, between Sat and Kayden. He used to hate being stuck in the middle, but it’s not so bad now, even as Darby yells at Kayden to open a window if he’s going to smoke. 

They wind up at Kayden’s. Darby and Raina’s is still an unbearable mess, and Sat lives out of town. “With my boyfriend,” she says, and the lump in Tanner’s throat drops square into his stomach to sit there, bricklike. She’s moved on, and it’s fair. Only a shithead would have wanted her to wait for a dead man, but maybe he’d expected her to wait, in some small part of him, and maybe that part of him is a head made of shit. 

“We need to take you shopping for glasses,” she says. “How bad’s your eyesight, are you going to need a prescription?” And that’s another rotten can of beans. He’s dead now. No ID, no health insurance; technically he’s not even a US citizen anymore. Going to the doctor is not going to be the easiest, even assuming his body still works like a normal body… He gives himself a shake before one thought leads to another and he drowns. 

Sat frowns up at him. “Tanner?”

He blinks, forcing himself to talk. “It’s not that bad. Walgreens should be fine.” It should help at least, even if he’s technically lying and could use something stronger. 

“You gonna want to call your family?” Kayden asks out of the blue. “We told them you died, but maybe we were wrong.” He shrugs. “I mean, all kinds of shit happens.” 

His family. Tanner hadn’t thought of them ‘til now. Everything in his life had revolved around them. 

Kayden's ripped window blinds bleed watery sunlight over the walls. “Just leave it,” Tanner says. “Telling them would only look weird. You could get arrested.” They could have already gotten arrested over the stunt with Raina. 

Kayden gives him a long, hard look. “Whatever,” he says. 

Tanner thinks about how it feels to know he’ll never see his father or mother again. It doesn’t feel like much of anything. He thinks about running into them accidentally, and all he can think of is running. 

***

Later that night, when the girls have all straggled home, Tanner lies on his back on Kayden’s ratty old couch and watches the headlights of passing cars boil the living room shadows into something inky and numinous. He’s been alive for over twenty-four hours. He knows he should sleep, but sleep is void and memory. Half-past midnight, he gets up, finds his sneakers in the dark, and leaves.

His footfalls echo on the pavement. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wails. A jumble of music from a passing car, someone shouting in Spanish. He smells exhaust and tar, still baked from the daylight sun. He fills up his lungs with it, thick and terrible and imperfect as it is. Someone honks at him, blaring until he jumps out of the way, heart pounding on sudden high alert. He leans against a wall, feeling the rough brickness of it against his cheek. It’s all too much, and it’s not enough, a cacophony of senses he can’t shut out, doesn’t want to shut out, can’t make sense of. 

He slams his fist into the wall and the pain is the first clean thing he’s felt in years. 

***

When he trudges back to the building, Kayden’s waiting for him outside. “You forgot the keys, dipshit,” he says. 

“I didn’t know you had extras.” Tanner's voice rings petulant in his ears. The skies are starting to lighten. He shivers. Just a few more seconds, a few more minutes, and he might have lived to see that sunrise on June 14th. “We were so fucking close,” he says. 

“Close to what?” Kayden grabs his elbow, steering him indoors, only pausing to look up at the last moment. Tanner watches the way he squares his jaw, mouth half-open, teeth bare. “Oh. Yeah. Right.” 

Tanner expects him to drop it, but then he says, “It should have been me.” Coming from Kayden, it’s quiet and uncharacteristically naked. The honesty - and how honest he knows it must be - catches Tanner flat-footed, unsure of how to respond. 

“Would that have been better?” Tanner finally asks. The bitch of it is, it's not hard to imagine. Kayden’s always been good at cutting of contact and disappearing. A life without him—that’s just inevitable. 

Would they have drifted apart afterwards, knowing he’d died to save them? Would they have banded together for his sake, the horror of it shared between them?

Would they have tried to revive him?

Kayden makes a derisive noise. “Yeah, no shit.” 

Tanner stares at him through bargain bin glasses. “So we’d have to bring you back instead. So nothing changes.” _There’s my answer, I guess_. 

A beat, and Kayden lets his breath out, something between a huff and a sigh. He closes the door behind them. “Go the fuck to sleep, Tanner,” he says, and goes off into his bedroom. 

***

Living gets better over the next few days. He eats junky, sugary cereal his mother would never let him have as a kid. He laughs when Sat tells them all about the time a guy asked her to pretend he was Jacques Cousteau in bed, half-scandalized, half-hysterical. Her French accent is awful; the guy's must have been even worse. Tanner wheezes, elbows on his knees, and pretends not to notice the relieved look on Sat’s face when he doesn’t tell her to stop oversharing.

He worries about having to get a job, and it’s such a stupid, banal thing to worry about, he laughs over that, too. 

Darby buys him a new camera without consulting him first, like she knows the first thing he would ask is how much it had cost. He can’t pay her back, can't pay any of them back, after all they've done for him. It’s stomach-churningly helpless, and it's a little wonderful.

He looks up at Darby through the lens and sees that she’s scared too. Scared he won’t accept, that he’ll choose debt over love. Scared that _things_ are all she can give people now, without magic, like giving herself isn’t enough. 

Tanner’s never been a hugger before. He’s hugged more people in the last several weeks than he has in his entire first life. He hugs her now, and whispers thanks into her shirt, and something gives inside them both. 

They set up a darkroom in the basement of the apartment building. It’s not Kayden’s space, technically, but Kayden says no one’s gone there in years. Tanner crowds all his friends into the light, takes picture after picture, feels electricity when he touches the negatives. With every roll of film developed, each of them comes into sharper focus. Darby’s yearning for something brighter than the world has to offer. The courage in Raina’s smile. Sat’s brittle bravado, bittersweet when he's not allowed to love her.

And Kayden. Kayden, who seems to have just resigned himself to Tanner in his breathing space. It's practical. Tanner needs somewhere to live, and it's not like he could have imposed on one of the girls, but. He keeps waiting for Kayden to kick him out, but he never does, and he never does, and even through the camera lens, Tanner’s never sure of what he sees in Kayden’s face. All he knows is he can’t look away.

***

The nights are… The nights are still hard. He sleeps when he passes out, runs laps, chugs Nyquil. Spends the better part of a night passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth with Kayden. He didn’t use to drink. He didn’t use to a lot of things. 

Then comes the night when none of it works. 

They’re on the couch again, with the TV on. Kayden's got the sound turned all the way up. Tanner would complain except that actually makes it better, makes for better company. He drifts to the wah-wah noise of late-night news, never managing to pass out all the way. Grogs awake to infomercials, some woman trying to sell him a better boning knife, and the sight of Kayden watching him. Kayden’s face, normally so expressive, is unreadable in the dim light. His eyes are very blue. He doesn’t seem to have realized the way Tanner’s watching him back. 

And then he does, and it’s like every shutter, every window in his soul slamming shut. 

“You looked like you weren’t breathing,” Kayden says. 

Bile rises in Tanner’s throat. “Maybe I wasn’t.” Hard to tell if unconscious is still alive. The pulse in his temples throbs to the tempo of a rising migraine. “And here I thought you were just watching me sleep.” 

Kayden scoffs. “You’re not that interesting.” The hot glint in his eye says otherwise. There’s a name for it, Tanner thinks, that blowtorch intensity of focus. 

“Let me guess.” Tanner’s voice burrs low in his throat, scratchy and tired. “You were thinking of strangling me in my sleep.” It’s not funny. He knows it’s not funny even as the words leave his mouth, but Kayden laughs. Throws back his head and laughs, like he’s finally found something in Tanner he can understand. 

“Nah,” he says. “Sat would kill me.” 

“ _I’d_ kill you from beyond the grave.” The laughter bubbles up, halfway to hysteria. It hurts, and it’s good, and it’s clean despite the gallows. Kayden’s shoulder bumps his, warm and solid, and Tanner-

-leaps more than he decides, lightheaded and slightly manic. “Thinking of kissing me awake instead?” 

Kayden’s nostrils flare. He doesn’t say no. There were all these rumors about Kayden back in high school. Tanner never believed them, not with Kayden and Sat the way they were - or were they? Did Tanner just imagine it? Does it matter now? 

“Do you want to fuck me?” he asks. He’d thought about it sometimes, guiltily, trying to forget what he’d just thought. Kayden, or some other guy, but mostly Kayden, because he knew Kayden, and because Kayden was like Sat, because he was brave and wild, and didn’t give a shit about anything. All the things Tanner would never be. It seems so flatline, so overly-simple in retrospect; refugee thoughts of a pre-apocalyptic world.

Kayden, true to form, rolls his eyes. “You know it would hurt, right?”

Tanner sucks in a breath. “I want it to.” He doesn’t want to talk about being dead, or how much it felt like nothing at all. 

“You’re fucking crazy,” Kayden says. Tanner’s gut flips in zero-G as Kayden shifts toward him, sinuous and full of purpose. He scrambles at Kayden’s shirtfront, nearly ripping the faded band name right down the middle. The couch creaks. Kayden’s fingernails are ragged on the button of his jeans, chipped nail polish and bravado as he unzips Tanner’s fly. His hands are warm. Tanner can’t look at him, and he can’t look away as Kayden slicks his tongue over his palm, and wraps his hand around Tanner’s dick. 

And it’s like fire, like flames licking up his thighs, hot water sluicing down his back. Kayden’s other hand on his hip, Kayden’s teeth on his throat. Tanner’s own hands fisted in Kayden’s hair, the stiffness and faint metallic smell of hairspray. Tanner’s heart pounding in his chest, the rhythm exploding as he comes, every beat singing, alive, alive, alive. 

“This isn’t what I asked for,” he says, after it’s been minutes, after he’s done gasping and panting, after his vision loses the warm halo of light that comes with the afterglow. 

Kayden smirks, and reaches very deliberately to wipe his hand on Tanner’s shirt. And Tanner knows he’s about to pull away, any second, any minute. He’ll get up and pad to the bathroom, taking the warmth with him, and Tanner will still be here, every one of his thoughts catching up with him as he loses the worst game of tag. “Well, Tanner,” Kayden says. “Maybe not everything’s about what you want.” 

Tanner bristles. “I never said it was.” 

Kayden’s lip curls in derision. 

“Fine,” Tanner says flatly. “You think you know me so well? Go ahead, tell me what I want.” 

Kayden leans in, close enough Tanner can see the flutter of his lashes. “You know what I think? I think you just asked for it. You want someone to say it for you, so you don’t have to. So you don’t have to let it touch you, or get your hands dirty, or have anyone know you’re as sick and fucked up as the rest of us. You want me to say what you want, so you can blame me for wanting when it’s been you. When it’s always been fucking you.” 

Tanner shoves him away. “Convenient for you to think that, isn’t it?”

Kayden folds his arms over his chest. “Am I wrong?”

Tanner says nothing. Words tumble around in his head, salad and soup instead of ideas, and there’s a vice gripping his chest, making it hard to breathe, even as some part of him glories in its heavy realness. 

“You’re wrong,” he says. 

“Oh yeah? Then tell me what you want.” 

Tanner kisses him. 

***

Kayden wakes up, and Tanner’s in his bed. Another nightmare he's had before, only this time the body isn’t cold. There’s no blood seeping between his teeth. Tanner smells like any guy, sweat and morning breath, a trace of fixer, and nothing of the grave. 

“You’re watching me again,” Tanner says. His eyes are still closed, like he can feel Kayden there without seeing him. 

Kayden mumbles something. It might be _eat shit._ Too early to think of something clever. He knows he _should_ say something about last night, but you know what? Fuck _should._

Tanner rolls over, rolls closer to him, belly to hip. They’d lost their clothes somewhere along the way, and the unexpected thrill of skin-on-skin is like no kind of drug Kayden’s ever downed. It’s a good moment, Kayden thinks, and then Tanner ruins it by speaking. 

“What did you do?” he asks, and it’s such a Tanner sort of question, all accusation and no context, that Kayden has to laugh. 

“Gonna have to be more specific.”

“What did you give up?” Kayden looks him in the eye and regrets it immediately. Tanner stares back at him, hard and brittle and halfway to shattered. “To get me back. What did you give up?”

Kayden rakes both hands through his hair, spikes gone limp in the night. “Okay, so you’re gonna love this.”

Tanner sighs. “Somehow I doubt it.” 

“No, see, I cheated.” The words bubble forth, almost giddy. This is the part Kayden hadn’t told anyone before. “The point is you give him something that sounds good, right?” This is the part where Tanner’s supposed to chime in or nod, but he just keeps on staring, so Kayden presses on. “So I thought, what sounds good? What sounds like something I’d never get my hands on anyway?” 

“You sold him a bridge?” Tanner asks, suspicious. 

Kayden grins. “Golden gates, pearly gates and all.”

At last, Tanner breaks eye contact. “Just tell me,” he says, and it’s soft, almost plaintive, almost nice, and Kayden’s fucked so stupid, to do exactly as he asks. 

“Guys like me,” he says. “I mean… I…” Damn it, he hasn’t stuttered in years, not unless he’s high as a kite. “Fuck, I mean. Guys like me don’t get a future anyway.“ His voice has gone thick on him in that cry-like-a-little-bitch way. 

Tanner’s eyes widen behind thick glasses. “You fucking traded your life?” 

Kayden snorts. “Do I look dead? This is me. I’m here.” He gestures around the room. “This is all I ever get anyway. And yeah, who knows. Maybe I’ll get hit by a bus tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll just stay here, in this shitty apartment, and nothing will ever happen, and even death won’t notice it’s missing me, because there’s nothing to miss.” 

“I don’t think there is a future,” Tanner says, like he’s determined to believe it. “Not a predetermined one, not for anyone.”

Kayden spreads his arms. “So…” 

“So you didn’t give up anything.” Kayden searches his face for traces of anger at the thought. It would be just like Tanner to get angry at him for cheating the system. For putting such a low price tag on his soul. 

“Like I said, I cheated.” 

Tanner… Tanner looks sad more than anything else. “Then I’ll help you cheat,” he says. “Or keep cheating, or whatever.” He pulls Kayden toward him, broad hand splayed over the back of Kayden’s neck, eyes steely. The pressure of it goes like a shiver down Kayden’s spine. “Because I’ve _been_ dead, and I’m not going back. And death, or gods, or fate, or things, or whatever the fuck we dealt with. It.” He closes his eyes. Sucks in a breath. 

“It doesn’t get to have you. You're _ours._ ” 

The bottom of Kayden's floor falls out. 

“So if having no future means being alone, then you’re already cheating, because that’s not going to happen. I’m here too.” His voice quiets and he ducks his head. “So maybe we’re both fucked.” 

Kayden kisses him, bites his lower lip as Tanner makes a helpless, startled noise into his mouth. Digs fingernails into his shoulder just to keep him close as Tanner’s thigh presses between his. 

“I’m not dragging you down with me,” he says between ragged breaths. 

Tanner’s mouth twists, lips white. Kayden's hit a button, and he doesn’t even know which one. “Fuck that,” Tanner says. “I decide what’s down.” 

And he slides down to match his words. Down, down, down, until his mouth is hovering over Kayden’s dick, until his lips close around the head, and Kayden shouts. He’s sloppy, inexperienced, and it’s still good, it’s still so, so good, even better with a slip, a graze of the teeth sending shocks up Kayden's spine. He sinks his hands into Tanner’s hair, winds his fingers in it and pulls. He can _feel_ the low, desperate noises Tanner’s making deep in his throat, like he and not Kayden is the one getting his soul sucked out of him. 

Tanner pulls up to draw a breath, mouth slick, pupils blown, and Kayden’s gone just like that, eyes squeezing shut as he paints Tanner’s face with jizz. 

The _stupid_ noise Tanner makes, like a cat getting its tail stepped on, is so utterly worth it. 

“You’ve got some on your glasses,” Kayden says, when he finally opens his eyes again. 

Tanner huffs. “No, _you’ve_ got some on my glasses. Asshole. Now I can’t see.” He fusses with them, probably making the smear worse. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, like sucking dick’s not enough to distract him from the grade A horseshit at hand. Maybe it’s not. Everyone’s got hidden talents. 

Kayden rolls onto his side. Facing the wall is easier than facing Tanner right now. “May not be up to us,” he says, only he can’t escape as Tanner leans over him, glaring. 

“So we _make_ it up to us,” Tanner says, like there’s any logic behind it, like he can make it so if he just says it hard enough. There’s no arguing with him like this. It’s fine, Kayden thinks. He’ll stay here until the novelty wears off and reality catches up. 

_You’re ours._ Tanner’s voice echoes in his memory, and something inside Kayden wants to believe, wants to remember Raina and Sat’s hands in his, Darby babbling at him about her occult hobbies. _We brought him back from the dead,_ he thinks, and it hits him, really hits him for the first time, sucker-punch and wild. _We took him back._ Optimism has never been his kink, but damn it. Kayden had told them he was already dead, three years ago on June 14th. Why does he feel so alive right now? 

“I’m scared too,” Tanner says, and it’s low, it’s a damned cheap shot, leaving Kayden with nothing to say in response. The sun’s in Kayden’s eyes, slanting golden through the blinds, and for a moment, he thinks he smells woodsmoke. 

_We got him back,_ he thinks. _Whatever happens, it’s worth it._


End file.
